I find it increasingly hard to believe that Joe Carter was in the military...

Carter must be more ignorant of military history and military science than I had given him credit.

After all, what do anti-war protesters mean when they say that they oppose the war but “support our troops?”

Quite simply, we don't want them dead. Ever read Catch-22 Joe?


The effort in Iraq was flawed militarily from the start; that's why I joined millions of others in the streets.

You and Hewitt can't say you "support the troops" if you support a mission that is doomed to failure because of cockamamie military "theories" that fly in the face of history and statistics.

Any fool could have seen it when the Iraqi army "melted away"; me, I simply did the math beforehand (you know, the stat that says it takes 10:1 to 50:1 troops to quell a potential insurgency).

Which leaves you in a quandary, Mr. Pro-lifer: either you don’t know that you're sacrificing thousands to needlessly die, in which case you're morally ignorant, or you're actively encouraging a pointless slaughter, in which case you're not simply a moral coward, but something far more gruesome.

Finally, you have no way in your little moral universe to support the troops then without supporting the mission, no matter how nasty the mission is.

The supreme excellence, Sun Tzu said, was to achieve the objective without the bloodshed. Our objective was - really- to maintain ourselves and those of the world without dealing with nasty religious zealots for petroleum.

Rather than heed Jimmy Carter's advice to make getting petroleum independence the moral equivalent of war, Republicans chose the "steal the oil" option.

It hasn't worked but at least Latin America's getting out from US hegemony.